What can you do every day to stimulate the areas of your brain that control social awareness, empathy, and consciousness? The answer might just surprise you: YAWN.
It turns out that yawning is great for your brain. In How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist, Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Mark Robert Waldman, “Yawning is one of the best-kept secrets in neuroscience.” (pg. 155)
Yes, you can think of it this way: yawning as many times as you can a day just might keep the doctors away!
Newberg and Waldman say yawning is essential. Yawning is connected to the manufacture of both dopamine and oxytocin. Dopamine allows you to participate in reward-driven learning. It may curb shyness or the tendency toward introversion. It may also be linked to diseases of the nervous system, such as Parkinson’s. Oxytocin is sometimes called the “love hormone” because it enables empathy and pair bonding as well as helping with our vital “tribal” functions of determining who is probably safe and who likely may not be.
People do yawn when they are tired, but research indicates yawning is a way of waking up the brain. When students yawn in the classroom, it may not be a sign that the teacher is boring. It may actually be an alert that something worth learning is being shared and cognitive functioning should be on the alert.
If you are not actually sleepy at the moment but you realize yawning is good for your brain, prime your yawns a few times each day by giving a few fake yawns. If you will benefit from some visual and auditory yawning encouragement, put Youtube + yawn into your search bar. I had over ten million hits come up when I did that.
While about 45 percent of people yawn when we see someone else yawn (mirror neurons at work), children diagnosed with autism seem to not do that.
This week, thank your family and friends, and co-workers and boss, for recognizing that our yawning is good for brain function. Ahhh…. You can really like the sounds of that!
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Rev. Debra Basham
Voice: (269) 921-2217 Small Changes … Infinite Results™ “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” ~Mother Teresa Tips from 5 April 2010 to 6 August 2012 are here: Archived Tips |